The thing that happens when you grow up without electricity is that you become really adept at entertaining yourself. Of course, at 10 years old I would have preferred to park myself in front of the television, except in this scenario the television was disappointingly blank. So I read voraciously. First children’s books, then young adult books, then art history books and opera librettos (my mom always loved all kinds of art and had held a number of art-adjacent jobs, so now I’m the person who smugly does not need subtitles at the opera).
But sometimes books didn’t quite cut it. That’s when all the neighbourhood kids went outside to play. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in a 14-story Soviet-style building. Ours was one of four identical buildings, across the street from a cluster of 9-story buildings, which, in turn, had a few other buildings behind them. What this resulted in was a ton of other kids to play with. You just had to find your group.
The groups of kids were divided by age, language, and primary activity. The 14-15 year old Russian-speaking girls typically just strolled up and down the street, talking about boys, flirting with boys, making eyes at boys. The 12-13 year old Armenian-speaking girls played games I’d never even heard of (it was amazing how language could define culture, even when you were growing up on the same block). The 10-11 year old Armenian-speaking boys squatted around, ate sunflower seeds, and picked on the girls. And occasionally all these groups would converge to play one big game of gortsnagorts (գործնագործ – similar to dodgeball but different, which results in my thinking that I should be not terrible at dodgeball, but I am).
I was about 10 at the time and spoke primarily Russian (my elementary school was Russian, but after the Soviet Union broke up, all education switched over to Armenian – good strategic move when you are trying to survive as nation of 3 million people, but I had the hardest time learning what I now consider to be my first language; and no, the two aren’t similar at all). And here I was, trying to figure out where it was that I fit in and who my people were.
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